Context-Aware Annotations for Distributed Mobile Applications

Abstract:
Transparency, e.g., with respect to space or time, is usually provided by design approaches for distributed systems. This works well as long as such properties are not relevant for the application itself. If this is the case, as in our target domain of cyber-physical systems (CPS), transparency has to be replaced by context awareness with respect to such properties while maintaining transparency regarding other aspects such as distribution. In this paper, we briefly introduce our approach called Distributed Active Objects that supports a systemic programming model for such context-aware applications. Based on that approach, we present context-aware annotations that enable the programmer to combine imperative program code with declarative conditions that represent the spatio-temporal context. We show how to integrate such extensions into the Java programming language and demonstrate the approach using two examples of context-aware applications.